A Historical Perspective

Henry L. Bart, Jr., Director

Tulane
University has a tradition of supporting natural
history collections that dates back to the 1880's. The
original museum was an exhibit-oriented facility
established in 1885 by a special grant from Paul Tulane,
who earlier that same year provided the endowment that
transformed the former University of Louisiana into the
private, nonsectarian Tulane University. Displayed in the
original Museum were specimens from private natural
history collections purchased with the grant, and donated
exhibits from the World Industrial and Cotton Centennial
Exposition held in New Orleans from 1884-1886. John
Williamson Caldwell, a chemistry and geology instructor,
curated the museum from 1885-1891. Joseph Finley Joor, a
botanist, served as Associate Curator from 1886-1891,
then Curator from 1891 until his death in 1892. George
Eugene Beyer, a German zoologist, was Curator from 1893-1918.
The museum was reorganized and revitalized under Beyer.
By 1907, it contained a little more than 170,000
specimens. Following Beyer's tenure, the museum underwent
a long period of decline. It was officially disbanded in
1955. The specimens - a number of which are still intact
today - were distributed to various academic departments.

The modern era of collection building at Tulane began
after the end of the Second World War with the hiring of
four biologists: herpetologist Fred R. Cagle, botanist
Joseph A. Ewan, invertebrate zoologist George H. Penn,
and ichthyologist Royal D. Suttkus.

Fred Cagle arrived in 1946. In addition to
establishing the herpetological collection and his many
scholarly contributions to the field of herpetology,
Cagle reorganized the zoology curriculum at Tulane and
revitalized the graduate program. The first two graduates
of the new Ph.D. program were herpetologists: Robert E.
Gordon, the recently retired Vice President of Notre Dame
University, and Don W. Tinkle, who until his death in
1980 served as Director of the University of Michigan
Museum of Zoology. In the 10-year period from 1946-1956,
Tulane zoologists and their students published 135 papers
and were awarded numerous grants and contracts. Tulane
Studies in Zoology (now Tulane
Studies in Zoology and Botany), a publication outlet
for research on the zoology of the waters and adjacent
land areas of the Gulf of Mexico, was established in 1953
under Cagle's tenure as Chairman of the Zoology
department. A corollary to publication of Tulane Studies
was the establishment of the Meade Natural History
Library, a special collection of natural history
periodicals Tulane receives on exchange from more than
400 museums and biological institutions worldwide.

Cagle moved into university administration in 1958. As
Vice President for Research in 1966, he was instrumental
in obtaining the large parcel of land on the Mississippi
River on which the Museum now sits. Cagle envisioned
developing the land as an extensive Systematics and
Environmental Biology Research Park, complete with
laboratories, library and housing for visiting
researchers. Cagle was replaced on the Zoology faculty by
Harold A. Dundee, a herpetologist who served as Curator
of Amphibians and Reptiles until his retirement in 1988.
Dundee continues to care for the Herp Collection in his
present capacity as Emeritus Curator.

Joseph Ewan arrived in 1947 and established the Tulane
Herbarium.
He achieved widespread recognition for his contributions
to the field of botany and the history of biology,
particularly interpretations of early American natural
history. George Penn, who also joined the faculty in 1947,
built a large collection of crustaceans and aquatic
insects, and a reputation in the systematics, life
history and ecology of crayfishes.

Royal D. Suttkus joined the Tulane Faculty in 1950 and
immediately began building the modern fish collection on
a foundation of just two mounted fish specimens left over
from the early museum. By 1968 the fish collection had
grown to a size of just over two million specimens,
overfilling its space in Richardson Memorial and
Dinwiddee Halls on the main campus. Cagle's dream of
developing land on the Mississippi River as an
Environmental Biology Laboratory was realized in part in
1968, when, under Suttkus' direction, the fish, bird,
mammal, and vertebrate fossil collections were moved to
the F. Edward Hebert Riverside Research Laboratories in
Belle Chasse, establishing the Systematics and
Environmental Biology Laboratory, now the Tulane Museum
of Natural History.

Suttkus devoted his career to collection building and
studies of the taxonomy and natural history of specimens
he collected. From 1963 to 1968, he was Principal
Investigator of the NIH funded Environmental Biology
Training Program, a summer program wherein students
received lectures and training while in the field
collecting and preparing specimens of plants,
invertebrates, fishes, herps, birds, mammals, and fossils.
In the years since the move, the fish collection has
grown to over six million specimens. In addition to
fishes, Suttkus added over 5000 mammals to the small
preexisting mammal collection left over from the early
museum, over 6000 specimens of amphibians and reptiles,
roughly 6000 vascular plants, and numerous aquatic
mollusks, crustaceans, birds, insects, and fossils.

In 1976, Suttkus convinced the Tulane
administration to formally recognize the zoological
collections at Riverside as the Tulane University Museum
of Natural History, and to appoint him as the Museum's
first Director. In 1979 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, National Ecology Research Center established a
field station at Riverside to study vertebrates in the
waters around the Gulf of the Mexico. Station personnel
assisted in the curation of the mammal, bird and herp
collections from 1979 until 1982 when the field station
was abandoned.

Suttkus retired from Tulane University in 1990. Over a
career at Tulane spanning 40 years Suttkus, has published
over 90 scientific papers, described 20 new species of
southeastern fishes (20% of all the species described
from the southeast during that period and 50% of the new
fishes from Gulf Coast drainages) and directed 24
graduate students (10 M.S., 14 Ph.D.). As Emeritus
Professor and Curator of the Museum, he continues to
collect and publish on fishes and other organisms to this
day.

In 1989, in anticipation of Suttkus' retirement, the
Tulane Administration brought in a team of external
reviewers to evaluate collections in the Museum and to
make recommendations on their continued maintenance by
Tulane. In their report to the administration, the
reviewers described the fish collection as "a
treasure of great national and international importance".
They strongly recommended maintenance of the fish
collection at Tulane and the immediate hiring of an
ichthyologist to replace Suttkus.

In 1990, the Biology Department at Tulane reorganized. The collections of the Tulane Museum of Natural History moved under the administrative control of the newly formed Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology (now Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, EEB). Henry L. Bart, Jr. was hired as Assistant Professor of EEB and Curator of Fishes at the Museum in 1992. He was appointed Director of the Museum in January 1993, promoted to Associate Professor of EEB in 1995, and Professor of EEB in 2007.
Under Bart’s leadership, the fish collection was computerized, manually georeferenced, recurated and improved with support from four grants from the Biological Research Collections program at the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 2002, Bart and recently hired informatics specialist, Nelson E. Rios, received a fifth NSF grant to use the manually georeferenced collection localities as a test bed for developing an automated georeferencing software tool. The resulting tool, GEOLocate, developed by Rios, is now the leading software application for georeferencing collection event data for any group of organisms, anywhere in the world. The GEOLocate Project has itself been supported by numerous NSF grants, and has grown into an entire suite of software tools and services.

In 2011, the Tulane Museum of Natural History is once again being reorganized. Research collections of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, invertebrates and vertebrate fossils, which long lacked active curators, are in the process of being deaccessioned and donated to other institutions. The vertebrate collections are being transferred to the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. The invertebrates will largely be relocated to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science. Thus, the collections will largely remain in the Gulf South region. The TUMNH fish collection, which was renamed in honor of Royal D. Suttkus in 2000 [see Royal D. Suttkus Jubilee], is being integrated into a new research center called the Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute (TUBRI).

Department of Ecology,
Evolution and Organismal Biology (EEOB). Henry L.
Bart, Jr. was hired as Assistant Professor of EEOB and
Curator of Fishes at the Museum in January 1992. He was
appointed Director of the Museum in January 1993, and
promoted to Associate Professor of EEOB in December 1995.